Archive for the ‘House’ Category

This peculiar and personal “loft” is located near Malvarrosa Beach, in the distinctive neighborhood of “El Cabañal” at Valencia City. The Origin house responded to the top floor of a very common type of town house between party walls. It’s accessed from the Street through a narrow staircase. The depth of plot required the existence of intermediate rooms that were illuminated and ventilated by a small courtyard; on the other hand, the kitchen and the “toilet” occupied the rear façade as attached parts, and connected through an ancient terrace that had been closed; Finally, throughout the house roof was a ceiling of plaster that hid the actual volume of the steep cover Gable.

By April 2009 a total of 6 houses have been finished as part of the Make It Right Program in the Lower 9th Ward, the owners were able to move back and enjoy the benefits of their new homes. Two of these houses were designed by GRAFT and chosen by the homeowners, as the process at Make It Right is popular vote. 9 more houses are currently under construction, one of them also designed by GRAFT, 10 houses are in the permit process.The houses designed by GRAFT are inspired by the Cradle to Cradle Philosophy and received LEED Platinum certification. They are prefabricated modular units, constructed off-site.

In 1953 Le Corbusier wrote a letter to the Chilean Architects, and was sent through Emilio Duhart, a very important Chilean Architect that was drawing for him the buildings that he was doing in that moment in India. In this letter he emphasize the need on taking care of people while developing a design process. He said that “in that moment academic ideas where left behind, and the smallest measurements, the shorter distances or the smallest built spaces, become precious as a glass of water in the desert”.

I’ve been wanting to design this house for a long time. The obvious design, with a series of rooms arranged along a line. My client wanted to be sure that it was possible to construct a good house on the site before he went ahead and bought it. This meant that time was critical one autumn day in 2003.

A white box, a habitat platform and the space generated between both elements, composes this project.

The box is separated from the base creating a large space open to the landscape. The white block contains the master bedroom, which runs through the whole front of the house, facing the sea, and the two guest bedrooms, located on the back of the lot. These three rooms are organized around a hall, which reaches the staircase, and also connects all three levels.

On a narrow, elongated site where a house already stood it was proposed to build a small studio that could be used as both a paint workshop and an occasional weekend home for the children of the owners.

The starting point for the project was given by the financial aspect, as it needed to be an economically viable project on a tiny budget estimated at seventy thousand euros. This factor limited both the structural possibilities and the finishes, which meant we had a very clear starting premise: we needed to work with the local industrial­ists (if possible from the same village), and with technical solutions that they were accustomed to, as they were the traditionally adopted ones in the typical constructions of the area. This premise led us to work with load bearing walls, single-direction forgings, aluminium windows of reasonable dimensions and conventional finishes such as painted render.

“Casa dos Caseiros” was first created to answer a private order for a social interest dwelling project to be built numerously throughout some cities in Rio de Janeiro state. Unfortunately after some time of development the project had to be canceled by the contractor.

Originally it was designed using steel frame as structural system, after cancelation we have updated the whole project to use structural concrete blocks, more usual in Brazilian construction, and still a rational modular building system. The project was set aside for a while until came the opportunity to build one unit as a prototype and still be used as home for the housekeepers of a property in a rural district from Campinas.

Peraleda House is a comprehensive rebuild, keeping part of the original walls of the existing house and the yard, located in a small and historic town in Cáceres. The project aims to think about how to revive an existing house into a contemporary home in a classic urban area setting with restrictive rules.